


And All Our Tomorrows

by midrashic



Series: A Collection of Invented, Improbable, and Irresistible Futures [2]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: AU of an AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Time Travel Fix-It, X-Men: Days of Future Past Fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 17:22:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28585680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: The future where Erik survives the Sentinels has its own darknesses—and its own beauty.An AU of "Other Futures Than These."
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Series: A Collection of Invented, Improbable, and Irresistible Futures [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2069736
Comments: 14
Kudos: 43





	And All Our Tomorrows

**Author's Note:**

> This fic picks up mid-[Chapter 10](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22168552/chapters/54942037), after Old Charles coaxes Erik into sleeping. This bonus feature then skims over major moments in the universe where Old Erik survived long enough to welcome the time-travelers in 2023.

“You shouldn’t coddle the boy.” 

That accent. That particular cadence. Charles knew that voice better than he knew his own, though it had been five years since he’d heard it regularly… and a lot longer than five years for the owner of this particular version of that voice.

As Logan bore Erik away, a man stepped from the seam of where the workshop met the industrial flooring and tiling of the hallway outside, having been partially concealed through a trick of the architecture. He was about Xavier’s age, and handsome for it: thick, steel-gray hair and a sprightliness to his eyes that belied his cragged face and thin-lipped scowl. _Erik_ , Charles thought breathlessly, because it could be no one else. _Erik._ It was like—what this what it had been like for everyone else, to see his future reflected in front of them like a funhouse mirror, like Charles upside-down and in reverse? It wasn’t the features that most defined Erik if he’d had to describe him to a sketch artist (a scenario about which he’d had nightmares the night after Erik had killed the President) that had withstood the test of time, his nose, his stern eyebrows, his ever-so-slightly crooked smile, but the other, subtler aspects that nevertheless screamed that this was Erik, this was his future: his jawline, his sternness, the gray-green of his eyes that had never, ever faded.

This Erik met his eyes and the very faintest crinkle settled around the corner of his eyes, and Charles tried not to think back to a time when he could interpret the multitudes of words in that simple expression.

“He needs rest,” Xavier was saying, in protest to Older Erik’s admonishment. “He’s been through an ordeal.” Older Erik harumphed. “I know,” Xavier’s voice softened to something fond and knowing, almost too tender to be borne, and Charles wanted to look away, to lose himself in something that wasn’t the reality of his and Erik’s old selves, painfully, obviously, in love again. “I know, you survived without any ‘coddling,’ as you put it. It is something I have lived to regret daily, so let me dote on for a little longer.”

Charles squeezed his eyes shut and swore, _swore_ to himself, that whatever happened, he wouldn’t become this Charles Xavier. This… _weak, compromising_ creature who’d taken Erik back, even after what he’d done. Even after all the pain he’d caused. When he opened his eyes, Xavier was looking at him, unimpressed. Charles fought back color as he met his eyes steadily. He wasn’t ashamed of what he’d thought. If anything, he was ashamed of Xavier, that he’d so thoroughly betrayed his principles… for what? For a man who would never love him as much as he loved his own ego?

“Christ,” Xavier muttered, “I can see we have our work cut out for us.” Older Erik let out a bark of a laugh, and Charles sensed that somehow, Erik’s older self had just won a long-running argument between the two of them.

Xavier was angry with him for some reason—it’s hardly though Charles could read minds anymore—but Older Erik was not. Older Erik fussed at him about what he was wearing (admittedly, it was fairly cold in the middle of wherever-they-were) and led him to a storeroom, where he outfitted Charles in a less heavily-armored version of his own clothes, the same thin-but-durable, weatherproof leather-like material of which everyone else’s clothes were made.

Older Erik was just like now Erik, if all his jagged edges had been worn away; he still radiated power and steely control, but there was a patience to him now that Erik had never had, and he was quicker to smile—a small, sly thing but one that Charles recognized instantly. It was the Erik he hadn’t dared to imagine during those halcyon days when Erik had been splitting his time burning down mutant research labs at night and teaching maths during the day. It was if Older Erik was all the fantasies he’d had about who he and Erik might grow into brought to breathing, sharp-but-gentle life. 

He could almost understand why Xavier had forgiven him, except—the open vulnerability of this Erik was endearing and utterly irreconcilable with the Erik who had betrayed him, killed the President, locked him out, and left him. The Erik whose _hamartia_ was his hubris, his utter belief in his own rightness. And there was something else that unsettled Charles—there was a darkness, a brooding pit of despair in Xavier that he could sense even without telepathy, something that made him wary of his older self even without the strangeness of him being _his older self._ Xavier had deep, painful regrets carved into his soul as surely as his face was lined with age. If Older Erik was everything he’d wanted Erik to be, Xavier was the exact opposite of everything he’d wanted for himself: cynical, untrusting, world-weary, resigned to the darkness of the world. 

— ⓧ —

In the forest, as the men and women they were there to rescue scrambled onto the helicopter, Xavier’s brow creased; he inhaled sharply and said, “He can’t. Erik’s having trouble controlling the Sentinels. His mind, it’s—he’s not ready, I told you he wasn’t ready—”

From where he was sitting behind Xavier babysitting Charles and Laura, Older Erik—Magneto, everyone called him, a silly little joke of Raven’s turned into a title that was spoken with deep respect and admiration—reached out and grasped Xavier’s shoulder. His ring finger glinted with gold. “Link us,” he said urgently. “I know his powers; I can guide him.”

Xavier exhaled slowly and turned to take Magneto’s hand in his. Their fingers tangled together, and Magneto’s brow furrowed, then smoothed, as he closed his eyes.

And somewhere in the forest, as Erik gritted his teeth and threw his shattered will against the Sentinels, a cool familiar touch in his mind whispered, _Erik. Let us help._

 _Help,_ Erik thought, agonized, torn nearly in half from trying to sustain his power when all he wanted to do was curl into a ball and cease to exist—and that mind, that wonderful familiar mind, gave the impression of soothing fingers through his hair and breakfast smells wafting from the kitchen, the peace of waking up in the mansion those beautiful, idyllic days when he and Charles had wanted the same things for themselves and each other and mutantkind. That mind brushed along the places where he had left mental fingerprints in Erik’s head, a buttress here, a support beam here, holding up the broken architecture of his consciousness that Trask and Stryker had left. That mind reached out and, like a mental handshake, Erik felt another presence at the edge of his awareness—foreign, but familiar, even more so than the Professor’s—as he plunged into a world of steel and silver, soft precious metals and hard alloys, a perspective that made as much sense to him as basic maths and a fierce intentness to do what he could not. 

_Like this_ , his older self told him, and showed him.

— ⓧ —

Together, they felled every Sentinel in that forest.

— ⓧ —

Logan and the man they called Warpath loaded two Sentinel corpses into the back of the helicopter, and the ride home was festive, almost jubilant; Logan tossed Laura into the air, all his ire that she’d followed him toward the battle forgotten, Hank’s hands shook on the controls with excitement and relief, Psylocke had kissed both Erik and Magneto, the latter on the cheek and the former a full messy affair on the lips. Erik looked flushed and exhausted with the use of his powers, but if anything Magneto looked energized, a tiny smile that he couldn’t quite suppress playing on his lips, and Charles thought vaguely that to use his powers after all these years, even if it was by proxy, must have meant nearly more to him than the possibility that the war was over, that the secrets within these Sentinel skeletons were about to be laid bare and dissected by Hank and Forge and Blink and the other mutants.

When they touched down inside the mutants’ mountainside base, a whisper spread through the collected masses of the mutants that hadn’t accompanied them, which crescendoed to a cheer when Old Hank hopped down and threw open the back cargo doors of the helicopter to reveal the lumps of inert Sentinel metal. The cheer shattered into hushed silence, though, when Warpath and Logan knelt to hoist the Sentinels’ bodies onto a work table where they could be dissected, their secrets pulled apart and held up to the light for examination. They had lost too many friends, lovers, even enemies to these things, Charles knew, for their lightness at their victory to last for more than a moment.

Hank adjusted his reading glasses—and wasn’t that strange, glasses on a Beast, but apparently even his preternatural eyesight had dimmed with age. “I’d like Erik to stay, please, in case the Sentinels re-activate…”

Erik looked like he was about to collapse where he stood, though. Charles opened his mouth to protest instinctively, but it was Xavier who got there first, wheeling up to Hank and placing a hand on his elbow quellingly. “My Erik assures me that the Sentinels are quite disabled,” he told Hank. “Let the boy rest.” And he favored Erik with a warm, glowing look that made Charles—well, made him uncomfortable in a variety of ways, not least of which was the way Erik seemed to stand taller, seemed brighter and more confident, under that gaze. 

Magneto placed a hand on Erik’s shoulder. “Distasteful as it is, I think it would be best if Blink checked your blood for the same nano-Sentinels that rendered my powers useless before you returned to our bedroom to sleep for another decade,” he said, and then gave Xavier a pointed look, “as _should_ have been done the moment you arrived here, had not bleeding hearts been consulted on the matter.”

“Erik—” Xavier said, and Charles cringed to hear that name spoken with the same fond exasperation with which he had said it so many, _many_ years ago.

“No,” Erik said, exhaustion clear in his voice; his accent tended to grow stronger when he was tired, and there was a bit of a slur to the crisp Germanic consonants as he said, “I’ll go. It’s… a good idea. I want to know.”

Xavier wavered, but it was clear that he was weak to the look he was getting in stereo from both Erik’s, the steady-but-beseeching look of wary hope. “Fine,” he said brusquely. “Do what you like.”

Charles took that to mean himself as well, and he stood at Old Hank’s shoulder as he and Forge bent over the Sentinels. Slowly, people began to drain out of the workshop, not that either man seemed to notice, immersed as they were in their own conversations. Charles helped as much as he could, but the technical talk went mostly over his head; he held his own better in the biological sphere, but even still he could feel the weight of decades of advancement hanging between them. From what he understood… Sentinels deserved their reputation as killing machines. The worst part was that they had clearly been modeled after _mutation._ Spikes exploding from their limbs like Logan’s claws, plasma beams like Alex’s coming from the concealed furnaces in their faces… it was like looking in a twisted mirror. 

Charles was almost relieved when Raven put her hand on his shoulder and said, coldly, “We need to talk, Charles.” Almost.

— ⓧ —

“Where are you going?”

Charles closed his eyes. He didn’t want to face Xavier, not now, not when he’d just learned what Xavier must have known for years, ever since he’d taken Erik back into his heart and bed and ever since they’d arrived in this godforsaken time in this godforsaken base. He didn’t want Xavier’s smug self-righteousness or his excuses for the pair of them or his goddamn _pity_ , and the fact that he didn’t know which one of those would be forthcoming drove him even more insane. He plowed forward, ignoring the way Xavier turned around and followed him. “Ah,” Xavier said, _annoyingly._ “I see.”

“What do you see?!” Charles bit out. “That I’ve been a fool and a coward?! You knew—you _knew_ —all this time, you knew what had happened to him—why didn’t you tell me?! Why did you let me continue to—to hate him, and ostracize him, and _threaten to send him back—_ ”

“Why did you hate him in the first place?” Xavier snapped. “Why did you never ask? Why did you never _press_? I was giving you a chance to be better than you were, than I was—”

“Well, I can’t be,” Charles snarled back, “and you must know that. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so many goddamn _regrets._ ”

“Don’t you presume to know anything about the shape of my regrets,” Xavier told him darkly. Charles scoffed and took off in a light jog; fast enough to outrun someone in a wheelchair. “He doesn’t need your anger!” Xavier called after him.

Charles spun around, incensed. “What the hell do you know about what he needs?”

“I’ve spent a decade undoing the damage that we did to him,” Xavier snapped. “I am an _expert,_ and you are an amateur. Take a walk. Calm yourself down. Don’t barge in there and start shouting at him about why he didn’t tell you, about why he hid this from you, hid himself from you. Be the rock he needs you to be, for god’s sake. Be better.”

Charles blinked. His eyes felt very hot and itchy. “ _Better,_ ” he repeated softly. “I’ve already failed him so badly. How much worse can I make it?”

“There’s always worse,” Xavier said.

As if in answer, the walls began to shake.

— ⓧ —

Before she’d stepped into the star chamber, Magneto had taken Jean aside and warned her, gravely, that depending on when she landed in time, she must consider the possibility that she may have to kill him to keep his DNA out of the hands of the humans.

So when Erik, cornered by Stryker and Sentinels, looked over the room to Magneto and Jean desperately, and Magneto put a hand on her shoulder and nodded—

She knew what to do.

— ⓧ —

When the attack was over, they convened a quick war council in the ruins of the infirmary: a shaking Jean, a Hank whose fur had been singed when the Sentinel he’d bent over had exploded as a result of some encoded signal from the Sentinel carrier, two Charleses, one Erik. Charles paced back and forth, running his fingers through his hair, his heart pounding in his chest: Erik wounded by friendly fire, Erik gone, Erik in the hands of those monsters _again_ , and he hadn’t been there, he hadn’t been there to—protect him or die with him, one or the other. Xavier said nothing, but he held onto Magneto’s hand tightly, squeezing at almost compulsive intervals, as though he could disappear at any moment.

They drew up a plan of attack together: two teams and one small infiltration unit. Magneto tipped his chin up when Hank asked for volunteers, but Xavier squeezed his hand particularly firmly, and he ended up saying nothing. It would have been cruel, in the end, for him to volunteer to go, for even him to leave Charles and the children behind.

(The other reason he refrained was what he saw when he glanced down to his free hand resting on the handle of Charles’s wheelchair: the way his gloved hand seemed almost transparent in the dim, flickering light. The timelines in flux. His past disappearing before his eyes. A liability on the battlefield, he thought. But a fatal weakness in Charles’s heart, too. Was it better to disappear between one breath and another when your comrades were counting on you or when your husband was watching? He looked at Charles, the barely-restrained panic in his eyes, the fear he could feel lapping at the shores of his mind, for their younger selves, for the uncertain future, and thought that there was no contest at all.)

— ⓧ —

When Charles, stumbling, the serum almost completely worn off, exhausted, frightened, jubilant, reached out and touched Erik’s mind for the first time in five years, saw the damage that had been inflicted and the places where Xavier had tried to mend it for him, glimpsed the memories and the pain and the terrible desolation that had settled over him when Charles had never come to rescue him and felt tears sliding down his own cheeks to match the ones that Erik had cried in captivity, all he could do was coax the kernel of Erik’s soul out of the hiding place it had taken up in and tell it:

_I’m sorry, my love. I’m sorry I never asked, I’m sorry I never believed you. I’m sorry I never insisted that I was strong enough to know the truth of what you did, what you suffered, that you never felt I was strong enough to bear the pain with you. I forgive you for the years apart; do you forgive me? Do you think you can ever forgive me? Do you remember being happy with me? When we thought that the best future we could hope for was just the past repeated? Do you think that… we can get that back? That we can do something better than what our older selves have done? Make something stronger that will outlast us? Do you think we can start over?_

And Erik’s mind, flickering, wavering like a candleflame dancing on the edges of breath, sighed and said, _yes._

 _Let’s start now,_ Charles told him in return, and reached out to the two minds that shone like meteors on the edges of his awareness—his own, and the mind he would have known better than anyone else’s alive. He felt Xavier’s surprise, and Magneto’s caution, and Erik’s awe, he twined them together like a crown-and-diamond knot, he made their thoughts a whirling disk of light, so entangled with each other that it wasn’t clear where one ended and the other began, who was Charles and who was Erik and who was past and who was future. Range and control, rage and serenity. In the net Charles and Xavier cast over the whole world—the doubling of their powers an effect not unlike being in Cerebro—Erik and Magneto reached out—

—and switched every Sentinel, everywhere, _off._

— ⓧ —

As they waited on Raven and Alex, who were saying goodbye to Jean, Xavier looked at Charles. With his telepathy restored, he could feel the way Xavier and Magneto walked around linked, a bond as constant and enduring as the rings on their fingers. Charles interrupted their mental conversation to brush against Xavier’s mind, hesitantly, and wonder, _You’re really married?_

Xavier smiled. Magneto turned away, but Charles thought he could see a smile playing on his lips as well. _Yes. Not in the eyes of human governments, but that has more to do with being mutants than being queers._

 _They changed the law?_ The thought dazed and dazzled Charles. _I never imagined… that it could be a possibility for us._

 _Eventually,_ Xavier thought. _That’s not the important part, though._

 _It isn’t?_ Charles sent back a wave of doubt and confusion. Xavier hid his smile with his hand.

 _I forgot what it felt like, to be young and gay and want to give the world to him,_ he sighed. _It_ is _important, but not in the way you’re thinking. Long before these rings, the people who mattered to us knew that we were one, united. I know your mind, Charles. I know that you love him, and have sworn to always love him, and protect him, and listen to him, and challenge him, and take care of him. That is the important part. Not the paperwork, not the rings—though they are nice._ He twisted the ring on his finger and smiled as he felt it through Magneto’s metal-sense, the way rays of magnetic intent bounced off that simple motion and spiraled throughout the room. _Keeping your promise to him—that’s the important part._

There was no sunlight in Forge’s workshop. The only cue Charles had that it was light outside, that it was almost noon, was the smell of Mulligan stew wafting from the cafeteria and the activity of the mutants rustling through the halls outside. But dust motes danced beneath the incandescent lights of their workshop, and Xavier’s smile was very small but very serene, and Erik was wrapped around his mind like a blanket, muffling the pain of the world, letting in only the beauty.

 _I will, you know,_ he thought to Xavier. _Take care of him._

Xavier’s hand found Magneto’s. And Magneto looked down at him with such naked affection, such warmth, after all those years, after all those regrets, and Charles felt tears come to his eyes. Erik glanced down at him, questioning, but he shook his head and memorized their older selves. Whether the world ended or not, this was where he wanted to be in fifty-five years. By Erik’s side.

“Time to end this,” Jean said, but she was wrong. It was time to start again.

**Author's Note:**

> Come chat with me at [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com/).
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. Comments on old works are just as valuable, maybe even more so, than comments on new works. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**


End file.
